


We Will Not Have Failure

by tricatular



Category: Victoria (TV)
Genre: Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 19:11:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13014315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tricatular/pseuds/tricatular
Summary: "Welcome to the Bunker," the man in front of her said. "And welcome to 2035."





	We Will Not Have Failure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ars_belli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ars_belli/gifts).



> Thanks for your prompts, ars_belli! I was inspired by current events and your love of power dynamics. I hope I managed to hit the relationship beats you love. :)

She woke up in a tank of sticky goo, hands shaking, head spinning. "Hello, Victoria," the man in front of her said.

She blinked, and in that moment recalled all her crimes - and then the re-education, in the monstrous tank of nanobots that she still lay in. "Oh, God," she said, and stumbled out of the tub, onto the cold stone floor.

"Welcome to the Bunker," the man in front of her said. "And welcome to 2035."

=

It went like this: the Nazis returned, and very quickly overran the earth. The survivors of their glorious purges tried traditional military warfare, but found themselves rapidly overwhelmed. And so they turned to science, and history, and found a way to resurrect the powerful people of a bygone era. "After that," her handler Henry explained, "we simply imbued you with a modern sensibility and gave you plasma cannons."

"And now you're winning the war?"

"Not quite," Henry said. "But there's a great depth of tactical knowledge that's worth exploiting, and the science of it all has rallied the troops."

Perhaps in her own time, Victoria might have pointed out that a glorious global conquest was worth fighting for and defending, not rallying against. But she had learned better now. She desperately missed Melbourne, yet knew that the finest way to honor his memory, to build something great in this terrible new world, was to kill every Nazi she possibly could, rally behind resurrected Genghis Khan's flag and purge the Nazis from every corner of England, that they might live to see a finer dawn.

So she merely told Henry, "Bring me a second plasma cannon," and readied herself for battle.

=

In the end, her first lesson was in leadership sans throne.

She had to win people to her side. The Nazis had worked hard to quell the countryside, make folk docile and afraid. They used terms that sounded bizarre to her ears, like "purge the Fake News phonies" and "Britain First". The first time she heard the latter, she'd said, "Surely you can accomplish that without killing millions of innocent people?" and had been roundly rebuffed.

Her first captive was a blond man named Emmerich. He fancied himself one of the soldiers of old, strong and legendary and pure. Victoria thought of Melbourne, of all she'd lost, everything she had known and as of yet forgotten, and brought him back to the Bunker at the top of her bayonet. (An old-fashioned weapon, but the resurrected were permitted their eccentricities.)

"I'm doing this for my children," he told her in the interrogation room. "You'd understand if you weren't a brainwashed, foolish bint. For the glory of England! We must secure the existence of our people -"

She slapped him. "No fear of the unknown justifies your actions, and no amount of recreational enjoyment of your finely combed hair could make me spare you. Now tell me where the others are."

He stared at her, panicked. She slapped him again. Henry said into her earpiece, "Please remember, torture is unethical and ineffective."

"Tell me," she said again, "or so help me, you will die in a pit of acid, screaming as it eats your face."

He wet his pants, as Nazis tended to do around Victoria. Then he told her everything.

=

As it was her capture and her intel, she led the raid. Before starting out, she tucked a portrait of Melbourne in her coat. She might be wearing mannish clothes and leading a raid on a high-tech bunker in a hellish future far beyond anything she might have once imagined possible, but she must needs cling to her sense of self, lest she become lost.

It was astonishing how cowardly the Nazis were when taken by surprise and faced with force equal to their own. She rode in on a horse and leaped off it, onto the guard gates, firing plasma guns from both hands. One Nazi, two, three - she had seen a movie where they took Nazi ears, and now she understood the appeal. They did not seem so large now, cowering before her weapons. Six, seven, and then eight men she killed as she strode towards the control room. Their intel had indicated that the control room held the PGP keys for eighty-five percent of the Nazis' remote arms, including drones and three satellites. When they gained control of it, the Bunker would cease to be relevant: they'd have all the power they needed to take out the Nazis and return peace, democracy, and equality to the world. 

Ten. Eleven. They fell so easily, she thought, and now that her weapons were smeared with blood, they ran from her with fear in their eyes when they saw her. Eighteen. Nineteen. Behind the two-ton steel door was the control room. All she had to do to get inside was grab the last Nazi by the ear and say, "Unlock it."

He did so, imagining she'd spare him. She killed him - twenty-two - and walked into the control room.

"Queen Victoria," said a disembodied voice. "Welcome."

"Reprogram yourself to align to democratic ideals, and place Henry and myself as your sole commanders," she said.

"Wait," whispered one of the Nazis bleeding out on the floor. "We just wanted...peace. Prosperity. A place for white people...we didn't plan to kill anyone."

"There can be no totalitarianism without enormous cost of human life," Victoria told him. "You should have realized that. Some things are games. Croquet, for example. I find it difficult to imagine that admiring the original Nazis was ever a game to you."

And then she killed him. "Access granted," the computer said. 

"It's done," she told Henry in her communicator. He sent his assent; he'd be by in twenty minutes or so, and then the real work of dismantling the remainder of the Nazis' fleet would begin.

She sat down at one of the control room computers, touching the pocket that still held Melbourne's portrait. She had imagined she might die once the battle was won, but now she found she wanted to stay alive, to finish off the Nazis once and for all. "It was never just fiction," she whispered to the dead Nazis at her feet.

Then she turned to the computer and got to work.


End file.
